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Adventure Eighteen: I'll Fly Away
Dr. Reines wants to examine the radio Celeste triggered to send us into the dome when he realizes that it sent a signal that affected the dome and that it regenerates along with us after every loop. Ruth and Vania stay with him in the house to dissect it. Inside they find some kind of organ that seems to still be alive. Having parts that keep moving after being cut off is a characteristic Vania knows has developed in the fauna on the Seshayan planet. Ruth discovers a trigger that is set to send out a tone if the radio is tampered with. *Alder takes the car to the Poutine Knight drive-thru and brings back an unholy amount of fast food to Dr. Reines’s house. *Earl tells the maid, Teresa Redfern, that Dr. Reines has given her the day off, and they go out bowling. They hear the air raid sirens and go into a bomb shelter with soldiers. *P0P1 explores the neighborhood and discovers a woman in labor whose partner leaves to find a vehicle, and goes in to help her. He brings her to Dr. Reines’s house. Dr. Reines knows her but knows that she will not deliver before the end of the hour. *P0P1 sets its radio to the frequency Ruth identified from the radio’s trigger. The signal is Morse code of a repeating alphanumeric code around 200 characters long. Ruth works on cracking the code while Vania and P0P1 search for the frequency that the radio will respond to. This triggers the organ to start transmitting on all frequencies and burning out the circuit board until Vania shushes it. *Dr. Reines takes Earl to the bath house and, during their conversation, indicates that he isn’t sure if the present world is worth saving from the building explosion. Earl tells him about life in the Outlands and teaches him about nanotechnology, which gives him a renewed interest. *P0P1 experiences the organ transmission as a physical pull and is briefly able to perceive the connection among those outside of the time loop, including witnessing Alder’s energy pulling Teresa into the web. P0P1 senses and opportunity to join the web but is unable to complete the connection, and traces the source of the feeling to the radio and the human/Aklo technology. He attempts to communicate with Alder before the time loop resets. *Ruth discovers that the hybrid device stores information outside of the time loop. Dr. Reines had used it to store notes during the first century but eventually gave up and lost knowledge of it until Ruth’s finding reminds him. Ruth is able to recover much of her and Dr. Reines’s *P0P1 has no memory of the previous time loop but apparently inserted a file into the device, which is a recording of “The Song That Never Ends.” Hearing the song seems to trigger P0P1’s memory, and he immediately goes to meet Teresa when she arrives. She sees the device and P0P1, gets scared, and runs away. P0P1 communicates that he stored his memory in the song file and regained his memory when he heard it and is now outside the time loop, and so is Teresa. *Dr. Reines’s current theory is that they can vent the energy stored up in the dimensional pocket across the fourth dimension relative to the sun’s gravity well, though not the other three dimensions. Vania suggests the Aklo technology would allow them to access even more dimensions to disperse the energy across. Once the energy is dispersed, the dimensional barrier will dissolve.